


Loves Company

by TigerDragon



Series: Shadow Games [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Break Up, Breathtakingly Insensitive Sherlock, Desperation, Devotion, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Foe Yay, Grief/Mourning, Gunplay, Guns, Non-Graphic Violence, Oral Sex, Post Reichenbach, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Public Sex, Rough Sex, Sleep Deprivation, Sleepovers, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-02
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-13 10:32:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John hasn't gotten his miracle. Working long hours and walking too much haven't stopped him from feeling his grief and the world is full to bursting with people who just don't <i>understand</i> what living in a world without Sherlock Holmes means.</p><p>The very last thing he needs is a visitor. Or maybe that's exactly what he needs....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The late July evening was easing from bloody hot to tolerably warm and John was walking home from work. As he did he watched people start to come out onto the streets again, reveling in the last few weeks of summer before dreary, rainy autumn was upon the city. For some reason today he didn’t feel burning anger for everyone who could still smile; hatred for any two people happy together. Maybe the clinic work was helping him feel more human, or maybe he’d just used up his anger for the time being. Still, lack of malice didn’t change the fact that he felt about a million miles away from anyone else, that every conversation felt like communicating in a badly-learned foreign language, that the people he used to call friends and family now seemed irrevocably altered.   
  
Intellectually he knew he was the one who had changed; it was there in all the books and in all the cases of extreme grief he’d seen. Nobody was ever the same again. People told him that he’d always be grieving in one way or another; that it might go away for increasingly long whiles, but it would always come back. Ella assured him that he would be able to feel connected again some day; that the rest of his life wouldn’t be spent in a haze of pain and loneliness.   
  
On the better days, he believed her.  
  
He kept walking. It was about three miles between the clinic and the flat, which took him about an hour and a quarter to travel. Most days he needed the cane. Sarah and others at work had offered carpools or to keep him company on the Tube; Mycroft had offered a private car. John had declined all offers. Lately, physical pain was the easiest reminder that he was still real, and since he wasn’t quite wretched enough to steal drugs, the exhaustion was the only thing that let him sleep.   
  
There were still nightmares, but at least his body could rest. If he got too tired, he’d make costly mistakes at the clinic, which on top of harming patients would mean they’d cut his hours or sack him outright, and then he’d have eight to twelve extra hours each workday to dispose of.   
  
Eight to twelve hours with nothing to occupy his thoughts but Sherlock.   
  
Eight to twelve hours of the same unanswered questions, the same overwhelming pain and guilt, the same terrible memories. Sometimes something in the flat would trigger another kind of memory, and John would break down under the unbearable sweetness of it. In the first few weeks, he’d shoved all of Sherlock’s things into his unused bedroom and shut the door; it helped, but there was really no way to completely remove the man from the flat. John hung a picture over the bullet holes but everything, including the walls, still reminded him every day of the friend he’d lost.   
  
It was just as well that he didn’t spend much time at home. Enough to sleep and eat and bathe, and that was that. If he wasn’t working, he was walking through London. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when the rain started. Probably just buy waterproof clothing and keep walking.   
  
He reached 221 Baker Street at about eight, unlocked the door, and let Mrs. Hudson greet and fuss over him a little. She’d taken to caring for him like a mother hen, and it was only because he could tell how much she needed it that he didn’t scream at her to leave him alone.  After the tea and chit-chat, he retreated up the steps. The flat was dark in the fading light, and he didn’t bother to flick the lights on. Kitchen, bathroom, bed. He didn’t need to see to do any of that, now there wasn’t any interestingly horrible clutter to trip over.   
  
“Hello, John,” a woman’s voice murmured out of the darkness. “Leg bothering you?”  
  
John ignored her until he took a bit of Chinese take-away from the fridge and a fork from the dishwasher. “Hullo, Sasha.” Limping over to the table, he sat. She was sitting on the sofa, slumping forward, too small and edges too soft to belong there.   
  
“You look dreadful,” she murmured after a few more minutes of silence. It was definitely Sasha’s voice - he’d only heard it once, but it had been a very memorable day. There was something wrong with it, though. Well, more wrong than usual.  
  
It was a kind of wrong that he was uncomfortably familiar with.  
  
He took a bite, closing his eyes to improve his night vision. When he opened them again he could see her face. Her expression mirrored her voice. “You look like I feel.”  
  
Her lips moved in the shadowy echo of a smile, and it did not reach the hollow darkness of her eyes. “When did you last get a clean night’s sleep?”  
  
Sweeping his gaze over her, John noted that she had a pistol in her lap, though her hands were cradling it the same way he’d seen people hold their pets after a traumatic event. Her clothes were as nondescript as ever, though even in the dark they looked a bit rumpled. If it weren’t for pure, mechanical routine and the desperate need to be employed, John’s clothes would probably look quite similar.   
  
“Two nights before the trial,” he finally answered. Took another bite. Swallowed. “God. These days I’m glad if the nightmares are about the war.”  
  
“You were on the street.” It wasn’t a question. She knew - more than that, she’d  _seen_ him. “You spoke to him before the end.”  
  
He let his eyes rest on the cold Chinese, not really seeing it. “Heard his last words, saw him fall, checked his corpse for a pulse.”   
  
“I was on scope. In case... in case. Your Sherlock said something... I don’t know what it was, but it startled James. Then James smiled and pulled the gun from the small of his back that I checked for him that morning and he blew his brains out right there in front of me. In front of  _him_ .” Her voice broke, returned in the barest whisper. “I don’t even know why.”  
  
He hadn’t seen Moriarty’s body. After Sherlock jumped, John wouldn’t leave his body until he was physically hauled away to the Yard for statements. When that was finished, Mycroft sent someone to cart him to Harry’s. If no one had tried to move him, John suspected, he’d’ve stayed near his friend’s remains until they were under ground.   
  
Bringing his thoughts back to the present, John focused on Sasha again. “What  _did_ you know?” It came out quietly but with a core of steel. “Did he tell you why--why Sherlock wouldn’t fight the smear campaign?”  
  
“You don’t know?” She lifted her head and looked up at him, a flare of savage life flickering in her eyes, and her lips curved into a cruel little smile as though the blow he could almost feel coming was a solace against her own pain. “It was you, John. James arranged it all. If Sherlock didn’t jump, if he didn’t put the bow on his own destruction, you were going to get your lovely head blown off.”  
  
The universe folded inward for a moment, intense pressure on all sides and Moriarty’s voice hissing in his brain:  _Burn the heart out of you._ Then his own, urging Sherlock to run, and the simultaneous fear and warmth he’d felt when his friend had refused to leave him to die.  
  
_It should have been me._   
  
He hadn’t even registered moving before John had a knee on the sofa and a hand around Sasha’s throat. “You loved it, didn’t you,” he growled, “One death and one ruined life no matter which way it went, a no-lose scenario.”   
  
She didn’t try to push his hand away. The gun was in her hand, the barrel pressed up against his ribs just under his heart, but she didn’t try to pry his hand away from her throat even when he started to squeeze. Her eyes were dark and fathomless, and he could see himself reflected in them - tiny masks of rage and pain under mussed hair. At the moment he didn’t care what he looked like.  
  
“So you’ve come to torture me?” The focus was fading from her eyes; she’d be unconscious in another thirty seconds, dead in another minute and a half. After all this time the rage was eager for it, glad to have an outlet, someone whose  _fault_ it was.   
  
_Boring! You’re too good to be boring, John._  He made himself let go.  
  
“Don’t.” Her voice came out in a ragged, bruised whisper, and she jammed the barrel harder into his chest. Looked up at him with the faint gleam of tears in her eyes. “Fuck you, Captain, don’t go soft on me now!”  
  
A death that wouldn’t save anyone was out of the question. A hard right hook was not.  
  
Sasha’s head snapped back against the couch cushion, both their bodies rocking with the force of the blow, and heaved against him in answer as the gun came away from his chest and went sailing across the room. Then she was all over him, slamming a hand into his kidneys and going for his throat in turn, and the only thing missing was a scream or a snarl or any sound at all. She was silent, wild, trained fury and they tumbled to the floor in a tangle of limbs, bruising and battering and savaging each other, too close for the kind of blows that would do real damage but neither willing to pull back. It wasn’t science or art or even really combat - it was savagery, pure and simple.  
  
At some point Sasha ended up on the floor under him next to the overturned coffee table.  Panting with her exertion, a trickle of blood oozing from a cut in her temple down her cheek and throat, her eyes flashed with a desperate, starving pain that seemed to recognize something in him and seize on it, because suddenly she wasn’t hitting him anymore so much as scratching him - clawing at him, at his clothes, at his skin - and then she kissed him. He should have been shocked, it should have enraged him again, it should have disgusted him, it should have.... but it didn’t, and he kissed her back ferociously, crushing her against the carpet under him.   
  
They broke more of the furniture  _fucking_ than they had struggling.   
  
After, when they were both as bruised and scraped as if they’d wrestled with Mycroft’s supposedly non-existent wetwork team, their clothes spread around the room in a state only questionably fit to be worn, their pulses hammering and their breathing coming in hard gasps,  _then_ he was shocked. A little. As much as he still had the capacity to be shocked. Less than when Sherlock had--  
  
And there he was again, come back to himself, back to the pain and loss. It made him tighten his arms around the woman he remembered hating, in the hope that the lingering warmth of her would hold it back just a little longer. The only thing that saved any fragment of his self-respect was that she was doing exactly the same thing, as if they were two half-drowned sailors clinging to the shattered fragments of the ships they’d been fighting to save and to sink just to stay afloat.   
  
She smelled faintly of sage and very strongly of cordite.  
  
“Now we really are a matched pair,” John murmured. “Perfectly wretched together.”  
  
Her laugh was bleak and weary, and she tucked her face a little more firmly into his shoulder. “When he was done, he was always up at once - something to do, something to write down. I’d just lay there and smoke, and he’d act as though I’d suddenly stopped existing. I never minded - should have wanted to kill him, but I never minded.” Her hand snaked out, fumbling for her coat, found it and dragged it closer. “I started smoking when I came back from the Regiment, for something to do. When we were working, I never needed one.”  
  
“I caught him with a cigarette once,” John murmured, absently stroking her back. “Gave him hell for it. He was cranky, but he put it out and slapped on about five nicotine patches. I think that’s why he ‘forgot’ an experiment in my closet.”   
  
“I found a case of depleted uranium under the bed once. No fucking idea what for. He said he forgot it was there.” She shifted against him enough to fish a pack of cheap cigarettes out of her coat, shook one out and offered him one. “I just left it alone, and after a few weeks it was gone.”  
  
“What the hell,” John agreed, lighting up. When she offered him the tip of her cigarette, he even did the same for her. The hot scrape of smoke in his lungs felt absolutely filthy. “He used me to learn more about the effects of hallucinogens. Deliberately scared the shite out of me to see how it worked.” Another drag at the cigarette. “This is really twisted, you know?” His voice was conversational, like he was talking about someone else. “That you and I are having this little support group. I’m half expecting you to kill me and I can’t be buggered to care.”  
  
“I couldn’t kill you, John.” She took a long drag and arched her head back to blow the smoke away from him, the gesture an almost exact mirror of the way she’d thrashed under him when she’d buried Moriarty’s name against her teeth. “You’re the only one left who remembers him.”  
  
Looking impassively at the shadowed wreckage of the room, John tapped his ash into the remains of a tea mug. “And you’re the only other person who believes that such brilliant, mad genius could exist. Did exist.”   
  
“I really did hate him.” Her voice was almost wistful. “But when he jumped... there wasn’t anything. Nothing. All I could think about was that James was dead.”  
  
“Like he took the part of you that cares with him.”   
  
“Yeah. Exactly like that.”  
  
They finished their cigarettes, and he got up to shower. Behind him, he heard her dress and go out. Neither of them said another word.  
  
He went to bed without bothering to put up the take-away.


	2. Chapter 2

He was dreaming about the sound Sherlock had made when he hit the pavement when the weight of a hand on his chest and the soft, demanding heat of a woman’s mouth around him woke him.   
  
It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was the first time it had happened while he was single, living alone, and hadn’t chatted up a woman in ages.   
  
He couldn’t help the moan that escaped his throat, or the reflexive upward push of his hips. He could deliberately grab a handful of dark hair, though, and pull Sasha off him long enough to look her in the eye.   
  
Her eyes were dark pools in the half-light, unreadable and half-wild, and again he found himself thinking of the tiger. _Thinner_ , the medical portion of his brain noted cooly. _Subtle bruising around the eyes suggests lack of sleep and/or significant stress._  
  
 _Obviously_ , he said to himself in Sherlock’s voice.  “Hello to you, too.”  
  
“Do you mind?” she asked, her own voice as dry and still as dust.   
  
A corner of John’s mouth twitched. “So sorry to interrupt,” he said politely as he disentangled his hand. “Carry on.”  
  
She did.  
  
He still had no idea how she managed to get into his flat. The possibility that she had a key was uncomfortable, but the possibility that she didn’t _need_ a key was worse.  
  
The thoughts that went through one’s head while getting a blowjob from the henchwoman of your mortal enemy and/or group therapy partner didn’t last long, fortunately.   
  
When he was finished, she wrapped the sheet over him and then crawled up enough to rest her head on his chest, still fully dressed - the blouse and skirt were new, but the leather holster and the pistol against his waist were familiar - and then rested her right hand against his shoulder in silent proof that she wasn’t planning on shooting him just now.   
  
“You took out the wreckage,” she noted, almost absently offering him one of her damned cigarettes. “Just today?”   
  
Doctor Watson was not pleased that John took it and let her light it. John told Doctor Watson to go stuff it.   
  
“The day after. Easier to tell the landlady that I’m redecorating. Don’t think she’d approve of shagging the furniture into tiny bits.”  
  
“Your landlady needs a hobby. Or a boyfriend.” She lit her own cigarette, shifting up on her elbows to do it, and smiled faintly at him in the dark. “I haven’t got a landlord to care about the state of my front room. I think the plates I lined up against the wall and shot to pieces are still there.”  
  
John’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Bored?”  
  
“Angry. It was less inconvenient than turning a shopping center into a shooting gallery.” She mingled her smoke with his, then leaned up enough to kiss him. It wasn’t quick - neither of them had anything but time. “I keep thinking that this week is going to be the week that I actually snap and see how many people I can kill before the Yard gets to me. How does it go, Captain - a short, sharp shock? Do they do that anymore?”  
  
A latent sense of disgust was stirring somewhere in the back of John’s mind. He frowned. “Beheading? Not here.” He took another drag. “I wrote Sherlock’s description of your M.O. up for the police. It would be pretty short.”  
  
“James wouldn’t approve. He hated sloppiness.” She sighed and lowered her head to his shoulder, letting the cigarette dangle loosely from her fingers. “I have all his things - his databases, his accounts, his contacts. But I couldn’t begin to pick up where he left off, could I? I’m not that sort. Never wanted to be an officer.”  
  
Stretching briefly, John yawned. “Even if I wanted to, Sherlock’s journals are in some mad code that I’d have to go to Mycroft to crack, and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him. Everything else was in his mind palace.”   
  
“Mycroft. The Other One.” She snorted softly and rolled over against him, taking another long drag from the dying cigarette and staring up at the blackness of the ceiling. “I think I spent a whole day considering going to him and just offering... well, anything. Everything. Just to go back to work. But I couldn’t stand to work for that fucking bastard, not after James. It wouldn’t be....” she trailed off, and her voice broke around a jaggedly rust laugh. “It wouldn’t be proper.”  
  
 _God, her and Mycroft? I’d really have to strangle the bastard then. Sherlock would forgive me the obviousness of it, I think._ “Or like crap espresso after top-shelf cocaine.” He’d recognized the junkie in himself later than the elder Holmes had, but not much.  
  
She made a little sound of agreement that was something between a growl and a sigh. “Maybe I ought to try to kill _him_. Do you think that would make James happy?”  
  
He thought about it, for about three seconds. _No, I am not joining forces with Moriarty’s right hand woman. Just shagging her is a terrible decision. I have at least this much of myself left._  
  
“Sasha, I have no bloody idea, and I don’t care to think on it. It would be a great way to get killed, though. The man has intelligence and influence over the whole country.”  
  
“Don’t you want to...” she shifted against him, and he could feel the hard shape of the gun pressed between them when she did. “How do we even _call_ this living, John?”  
  
“In the strict biological sense.” The cigarette between his fingers was almost spent. The last drag was just as awful as the first. “The only thing I want is to have him back.”  
  
“It would be worth that, to have James back.” She choked out another broken little laugh. “Then we wouldn’t need each other anymore.”  
  
John ground the smouldering cigarette end against the horrid wallpaper. It was in keeping with the bullet holes. “The universe back in its proper order,” he said without sarcasm.   
  
“The way it should be.” She flicked out her own cigarette, then curled around him and closed her eyes. He could feel the change in her breathing. “Good night, John.”  
  
Frowning down at her, he sighed. “Having sleepovers now, are we?”   
  
She was already asleep, and he pushed her into a position that didn’t involve a gun in his ribs. It was surprisingly easy to lose consciousness.  
  
When he woke up in the morning, she was gone. When he realized over breakfast that he didn’t know if that was a relief or not, he needed a second shower.


	3. Chapter 3

By October John had started accepting Greg’s periodic invitations to have a pint at a local pub. They talked about the weather, football, some politics, telly, things like that--they hadn’t talked about Sherlock since John had given his last statement to the Yard and the DI had offered his condolences.  
  
Before, it would have been impossible, since Sherlock was all John could think about. Now his brain was allowing other things some time--little, mundane things. The bits and pieces that composed the majority of a life.  
  
He was still a far cry from feeling human, but it was a start.  
  
“We have a live one right now,” Greg said between the top and bottom of the third round of pints. “Sort of thing that makes me wish....”  
  
He trailed off, but it was enough. Memories he wished he could ‘delete’ crowded John: pleading with Greg to ignore the so-called evidence of Sherlock’s deception, the DI hating every minute of it but arresting the detective because he was a policeman all the way down to his bones. The drugs bust on their first day together, Lestrade commanding his team to obey Sherlock because of his trust in his genius.  
  
 _Because Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and if we’re very lucky he may someday even be a good one._  
  
When John wished for anything remotely realistic, it was that he could somehow convince Lestrade that his hope had been fulfilled rather than painfully disappointed. Could he tell him what Sasha had said? Could he get the words past the barbed tangle in his throat?  
  
Greg’s expression told John that he’d begun to visibly brood.  
  
He stood up. “I’m going to the loo,” he said in a voice he barely recognized. “Put some water on my face.”  
  
That he managed not to stumble over anything on his way was more a matter of luck than anything else, because his vision had dissolved into a dim blur of unshed tears. He almost ran into the woman headed for the door opposite the men’s, started to apologize, found he couldn’t. Wiped at his face angrily for a moment before she handed him a handkerchief that let him clear his eyes. He had the distant impression of bottle-blonde hair, a vaguely attractive face with a bit too liberal an application of make-up, the sort of dress that women used to try to seem classy but available for shagging at the same time, a large black purse from which she’d produced a cigarette case in flagrant defiance of the indoor smoking ordinances.  
  
“Light me up, Doctor?” The voice was pure Dublin brogue, low and sweet and charmingly young, and it deflected his dulled, natural indignation long enough for reflexive courtesy to get one of the steel lighters Sasha was always leaving behind at the house out of his pocket.  
  
He looked up at the young woman to tell her he would do no such thing, and then the eyes and the smile changed. Without a word, Sasha Moran tucked her cigarette behind his ear and shoved him through the door into the men’s lavatory with her tongue buried in his mouth.  
  
John’s body sorted itself out long seconds before he could wrap his brain around the situation, by which time he had a hand up her skirt and was shoving her against the rickety inside wall of the nearest cubicle. It rattled but held, and she practically climbed him as she got her legs around his waist and one arm around his neck, the other busy with his belt and buttons with unambiguous urgency. _Bad idea,_ his brain insisted. The rest of him ignored it, and then his attention was caught up in trying to fuck Sasha as hard and quiet as possible. Little cut-off moans and grunts echoed off the dingy tile, their breathing heavy in each other’s ears, and then Sahsa came right before John did, clamping down on him and catching his mouth in a bruising kiss. They shook against each other, rattling the cubicle down to its bolts, and then her nails tightened at the back of his neck in wordless urging and he discovered that his body, rather than being decently appalled at their current circumstances or even unable to be interested, seemed to view the possibility of getting caught as a positively wonderful incentive for having another go. Sasha seemed to have the same idea, and neither party seemed at all interested in what Doctor John Watson thought about the subject. He lasted a bit longer this time - fatigue, if nothing else - and finally she twisted herself around and braced her hands against the stall so she could look back over her shoulder and give him the most singularly filthy look of encouragement he’d ever received in his life. It was certainly _inspiring,_ after a fashion.  
  
By the time he finally pulled away and did up his pants, he was sore in ways he’d forgotten he could be. She flashed him a vaguely satisfied smile, her own eyes dancing with adrenaline and her grief momentarily forgotten, and she extracted the miraculously untouched cigarette from his ear and offered it to him expectantly as if they were two teenagers out behind the school cutting class for a shag.  
  
“You’re bloody unbelievable,” he whispered, flicking the lighter. God, he was smiling.  
  
“Could say the same of you, Captain,” she whispered back with a wicked little grin, blowing a stream of smoke and then handing him the cigarette so she could take out another and light it from what was now apparently his. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”  
  
“I’m just full of surprises,” he muttered, wondering when the smoke alarm would activate. “Did you just happen to stop by or were you aiming to shag a room over from a DI?”  
  
“Bit of both, really. I was going mad staring at the walls of my flat and decided to spend the night following you. Didn’t expect you to be having a pint with the good Inspector, but fuck it. You needed a pick-me-up.” She took another drag, blew it away and then leaned in to kiss him again roughly. “Fancy a cigar before you go?”  
  
Coughing on the smoke and the audacity of the offer, not to mention the vividly detailed mental image that went along with it, John shook his head. “No,” he said clearly. “I’m going to get back before he issues a missing persons.”  
  
“Suit yourself.” She took another drag, then threw the dead end into the sink off-handedly and straightened herself with a few tugs. The make-up, she didn’t bother to fix, and she looked every inch the girl who’d just been shagged in the loo when she dropped back into her brogue and flashed him a wink that took a decade off her age. “Have fun without me, guv.”  
  
Shaking his head, John waved her away. He needed a bit longer to wipe the lipstick from his lips (and throat, and ear), run his fingers through his hair, make sure his zip was done up and buttons in place. He looked like he’d been up to something, and for the first time in his life he hoped Greg assumed he’d been crying.  
  
He heard the door shut behind her, and wondered if he’d recognize her if he saw her on the street. Sherlock could do that - remake himself into someone else right in front of your eyes. He wondered, while he washed his face, if it was something you had to have special training to do or if it just required being slightly unhinged.  
  
 _Sherlock could do that._ His hands stopped, his shoulders started to tremble, and he had to press his palms against the edge of the sink to make himself still again.  
  
 _Sherlock,_ his mind informed him with cruel dispassion, _can’t do anything anymore._  
  
Greg was going to be absolutely right about the crying thing when he finally did get back to the table, observed a voice in his head. It sounded remarkably like Sherlock’s.


	4. Chapter 4

On Christmas Eve, amid a frankly intolerable assault of jolly music, cheerful young people, and ridiculously bright advertisements, John limped home. His leg had been feeling a bit better in November, but then the shopping and spirit and cheer had started and his recovery might well have been a dream. It was a cruel irony that the atmosphere he so desperately wished to avoid was the main reason he couldn’t escape fast enough.  
  
Halfway to Baker Street, John was grumbling to himself and trying not to glare at innocent passersby when he got a text.   
  
It was from Greg, as John half-expected. It was not, however, regarding the family dinner John was invited to.  
  
 _Three dead, all gunshot wounds, weapon and ballistics very muddled. Can you come look?_  
  
John froze on the sidewalk. It would hurt, doing it without Sherlock.   
  
A second later, he was typing a reply. _Everything_ hurt without Sherlock, and he was suddenly very aware of how much he’d missed helping to solve crimes. He wouldn’t go so far as to call it brilliant that someone was dead, but still John smiled as he waved for a taxi.   
  
It was, in fact, Christmas.  
  
It took him an hour to get to the miserable little flat in Fleet that the police were holding for him, about twenty minutes to make a thorough examination and about two more hours in the morgue lab to be sure of his conclusions. By the time he was finished sorting London’s finest out, he was exhausted and his head hurt almost as much as his shoulder and he hadn’t felt so awake and alive since before Moriarty’s trial. He took a taxi most of the way home and walked the last quarter mile with his cane hooked over his arm. It was damn near midnight, and that was the only reason he kept quiet as he unlocked the front door and went up. If it’d been daylight, he might even have whistled.  
  
The lights were on in the flat, which wasn’t how he’d left them.

She was waiting in the living room, wearing the sort of velvety, long-sleeved, full-length dress that would be completely appropriate for a family Christmas party. The neckline was low enough to flatter but not enough to advertise, and John felt surprise colliding with irritation and, for the first time since July, wariness.  
  
“Hi.”  
  
“Hello.” She scooped a glass of wine off the table and offered it to him, smiling with a welcome that was uncomfortably unstrained. Like the dress, really - he’d gotten vaguely used to the two of them seething over each other like rabid teenagers, but this was too casually intimate. Too real. “I thought you might be late, so I left dinner to warm in the oven. It should still be reasonably edible. Did you enjoy the murder?”  
  
“Tell me you didn’t....”  
  
“No.” She laughed softly. “I wouldn’t insult either their memory or your intelligence by playing silly buggers like that. I heard you’d been called in, that’s all. Merry Christmas, John.”  
  
Relaxing slightly, John took the glass and raised it. “Merry Christmas.” It was very good wine, which made him feel like he should say so, an impulse he ignored. They didn’t make nice.  
  
Tossing his bag onto the sofa, he went to the kitchen and peeked into the oven. “A Christmas goose and all the trimmings. Feeling domestic?”   
  
“Don’t be a wanker, John.” She flashed him a smile that was all steel, even if her eyes sparkled when she said it. “Now go fetch your present off the hearth while I serve this - you’ll only make a bloody mess if you try.”  
  
Rolling his eyes and closing the oven, John made his way to the fireplace. Knowing Sasha, his ‘present’ might be explosive, poisonous, disturbing, or possibly all three.   
  
“I didn’t get you anything,” he called over his shoulder. It sounded more apologetic that he wanted it to.  
  
“I’m sure you would have, if I’d told you I was coming. Now bring it in here so I can watch you open it.”  
  
It was big - about the size of a small briefcase or a government service box. It was heavy, nothing moved around when he lifted it, and he thought he felt hinges through the paper on one end. On his way over to Sasha, he grabbed a letter opener from the too-neat desk.  
  
Had he tidied the desk, or had she? He didn’t remember, and the thought jarred him.  
  
He set the present on the table next to the cutlery. Sasha had pulled out the nicer pieces from the flat’s motley assortment and arranged them, somehow, attractively. The food was served - she’d been quick about that, which wasn’t a skill he’d imagined her having - and she was pouring fresh glasses of wine while he took the letter opener to the bright red paper spangled with holly branches. It came away cleanly, exposing the plain black hard-case beneath, and when he tried the case it opened smoothly in spite of the combination locks visible on either side of the handle. Waiting for him to set them, of course. He glanced up at her, found her smiling at him in anticipation, finally opened the case.   
  
It was a gun - a sleek, full-sized pistol with black controls on black finish. It shouldn’t have been a surprise - what else was she going to get him except a gun? - but it still knocked him speechless. She didn’t seem to have trouble filling in the silence.  
  
“Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal’s best, the Five-Seven. Twenty-round capacity, five-point-seven by twenty-eight millimeter ammunition - wonderful ballistic performance against body armor, that, especially with the armor piercing rounds - and a cold-hammer chrome-lined octagonal-rifling barrel that’ll throw them at six-fifty meters a second. Wonderfully accurate, only a pound and a half with the magazine in, tritium-lit fixed sights - I thought you’d prefer those to the adjustable. The tools and three standard mags are in the case, plus two thirty-round extendeds, a tactical flash, laser sights and a Gemtech silencer. The grip’s adjusted for your hands, and I stashed five cases of ammunition up in the hideaway under the upstairs cupboard, which should keep you stocked a while.” She was still smiling at him like the girlfriend who’d gotten you an amazing present nobody else would have.  
  
The whole thing was illegal and too intimate and creepily dysfunctional, but he couldn’t help himself. “This,” he said slowly as he lifted the weapon out of its foam, “Is bloody brilliant.” She was right--it fit perfectly in his hands. He sighted along the barrel, admiring the clean lines and softly-glowing sights, aiming at objects at varying distances. From the corner of his eye, he could see Sasha beaming.   
  
“I have never wanted to shoot something so much as now,” he admitted, running his fingers lightly over the various pieces in the case. Looking back up at the markswoman, he raised an eyebrow. “Are you literally the Devil? I’m pretty sure I signed over my soul just now.”  
  
“Only figuratively, darling.” She slid around the table and kissed him lingeringly on the mouth, her eyes dancing with delight. “Merry Christmas.”  
  
He slid the gun up between them, resting the barrel against her jaw, and she made a sound in her throat that started an answering growl all the way down in his chest. She twisted against him, setting the wine on the table and arching her head down to run her lips along the cool polymer that surrounded the steel of the slide. It was the most disturbingly erotic thing he’d ever seen in his life.   
  
By the time they got back to the table, the food was cold and her dress was ruined past salvage. Neither of them cared.


	5. Chapter 5

The abandoned house on Abbot’s Walk was only a few hundred meters from a brace of hotels, which made getting lost in the foot traffic absurdly easy. John felt in his pocket for the key, mentally re-checked the address for the third time even though he’d been here a dozen times already in the last few weeks, then let himself in. Sasha was already in the long basement, its concrete floor padded in sound-absorbing tiles, her hair tied back roughly and ear protectors in place. The suppressed 10mm Glock in her hand swung down as he entered, some trick of peripheral vision cluing her in on his presence, and she paused long enough to verify it was actually him. She waited for him to pull his own ear protection off the rack by the door and put it on, then lifted her pistol and engaged the targets downrange with quick, professional double-taps broken up by slower, more carefully aimed headshots.   
  
_Leave it to Sasha Moran_ , he thought to himself dryly as he added eye protection to the ear mufflers and pulled the FN 5-7 from the small of his back, _to have her own firing range not a quarter mile from the University of London._  
  
Honestly, he wished he’d thought of it himself two years ago. Loading the pistol, calmly lining up targets, and squeezing the trigger could settle his nerves for days at a time, and keeping his skills in top form meant he’d be ready for the odd crime scene that hadn’t been properly fled. He screwed on the silencer, checked the magazine, flicked off the safety, chambered his first round and closed his eyes. His breathing steadied, slowed, and then his hands came up and his eyes opened.   
  
The week before Lestrade--he was Lestrade when they were working--had called him in for the third time. His medical skills had been a polite afterthought, this time. Oh, they’d wanted him to look at the garrotte wound because it was exotic, but any of Lestrade’s people could have done that. It was how the body had been moved and from where that had been baffling them, and it was obvious Lestrade had been hoping John might have an idea he’d overlooked. To be fair, he’d almost overlooked it himself - he’d been standing there as slack-jawed as everyone else when he’d happened to look right at the scrapes on the pavement outside and remembered something Sherlock had said about how very convenient the new portable storage containers would make moving a body. Then it’d been simple - of course you could just kill someone inside the pod, leaving the weapon, blood, and the coveralls you wore over your own clothes, move the exsanguinated body in an empty room, and someone from the shipping company would come along and remove your evidence for you. Maybe you could even clean it up and get the weapon back later. Then he’d just had to get a train schedule, and everything else had fallen into place.   
  
_Well done, John. It wasn’t completely dull, at least._ John’s mouth quirked a smile. He’d never be a genius of any kind, but he wasn’t completely useless.   
  
The slide locked open on an empty chamber, and his hands were already swapping the magazines before he fully processed he’d already put twenty rounds downrange. Twelve in the X ring - which was now more hole than paper - seven in the ten ring and a single floater in the eight ring. _Steel on target,_ a back corner of his mind noted with cold approval. Not useless at all _._  
  
He’d closed the blog, of course. People still sent e-mail. At first it had infuriated him - didn’t they know Sherlock was dead? - but seven or eight days ago he’d started actually reading them and realized that it wasn’t ignorance or stupidity that kept them sending off those e-mails to a dead, discredited genius. It was desperation, or a thin hope that someone might be able to help them. He wasn’t Sherlock, he would never be Sherlock... but there were a couple of those e-mails he might be able to do something about. Just possibly.   
  
If he could, didn’t he have a responsibility to?   
  
He snapped off five shots in quick succession, his wrists aching with the effort of controlling the recoil, and watched the heart of another paper target disintegrate.   
  
_Responsibility? It might benefit others, John, but you just like it._   
  
He finished the magazine, teeth bared in a smile, then ejected it and walked back to the storage rack for a box of ammunition to refill it. The distant thunder of Sasha’s firing had stopped, and he peeled off the ear protectors and glasses before he started locking rounds into the magazines.   
  
“You were dead zero today, John. If you’d actually been here during the shooting, you might have put them all on the X.” Sasha’s hand slid up his back in an absent caress as she joined him, selecting a box of 10mm to fill her own emptied mag. “Enjoying your new career?”  
  
He snorted. “Wouldn’t call it that, but yeah.” Magazine full, he clicked it back into the receiver. “Don’t tend to get a lot of danger in the clinic.”   
  
“Or the office.” She slid the Glock back under her jacket, the same small-of-the-back carry he’d taken to using, then gave him a lingering look he couldn’t quite make sense of. “‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes,’ is it?”  
  
Eyes tight at the corners, John inhaled sharply. “I have a gun, you know.”  
  
“True.” She shifted, squaring herself with him for a minute as she looked him in the eye, then sighed and reached up to cup his jaw. After a few more seconds of silence, she kissed him. “It’s been a bad week. Someone’s yanking on threads and I can’t figure out who. It was out of line, Captain, and it won’t happen again.”  
  
She’d never mentioned the details of her work before, and she’d never apologized before. Why was she starting now? It was a tiny, insignificant sign of the casual intimacy she’d been showing him since Christmas, and he couldn’t explain why it bothered him so damn much.  
  
His eyes still distant, he leaned forward and answered Sasha’s kiss lightly with one of his own. “Forget it.”  
  
Her fingers slid under his jacket, her voice dropping to a throaty husk, and she shifted enough to taste his pulse with her tongue. “There’s a bed upstairs.”  
  
“Right.” His lips twitched in a wry half-smile. “Not wasting any time today, then.”  
  
She laughed, wrapped her fingers with his and pulled him toward the stairs. The way she took them reminded him of a tiger on the hunt. “Never saw the point, darling,” she tossed back at him. “Here today, gone tomorrow, so enjoy it while it lasts.”  
  
The room was small, empty of furniture except a wrought-iron bedframe sporting red sheets and a hard mattress, and the gray floral-print wallpaper ate up what little light leaked through the half-closed window blinds. She peeled his jacket off first, then her own, and the guns went down on top of the leather. The rest went carelessly as ever - his shirt, her jeans, he’d probably never find his damn socks. The bed creaked when she shoved him down on it, hands bruisingly eager on his skin, and his body responded readily enough. It always did, whatever he might feel about it at the moment.   
  
She was beautiful, after a fashion. He’d never thought about it before today - thinking wasn’t really the reaction he tended to have when she was around - but with her hand tangled in his hair and her body astride his, watching her watching him fuck her, she was. Lean, taut, loose dark hair and burning eyes - not the sort of face to stop you on the street, but there was a clean sharp elegance to it that was utterly its own. Some part of him wanted to believe that if he looked at her long enough, he’d see the ugliness there - she was a murderer a hundred times over, after all - but when she tightened against him and he watched her eyes close in pleasure, he knew better. She was what she was, and the beauty wasn’t an illusion.  
  
The beauty of a knife didn’t make it less dangerous, any more than the perfection of his gun made it less an instrument of death.  
  
After he’d shuddered up into her, gasping and digging his short nails into her hips, they lay quietly for a moment. Before the sweat had dried completely from his skin, Sasha interrupted his staring contest with the ceiling with a proffered cigarette.  
  
John reached for it out of habit, but didn’t pull it from the pack. “Not today,” he murmured, pulling his hand back.  
  
She stared at him a while, eyes unreadable in the near dark, then took one from the pack, lit it, and took a lingering, almost defiant drag. “Suit yourself, Captain,” she said so softly the words almost vanished in the thick, dusty silence. “Suit yourself.”  
  
They lay in the dark a while longer, saying nothing, and when they dressed at last neither of them looked at the other. Their hands brushed when she handed him his gun, and her shoulder brushed his chest when he held the door out to the street for her. By the time he got to the end of the block, some momentary weakness drove him to look back over his shoulder, but the street was full of strangers and she was gone.


	6. Chapter 6

He was coming up the block toward the flat when he saw her, the hint of a silhouette in the half-light of an alley, and his hand started for the grip of the pistol at the small of his back before his brain stopped it. If he was seeing Sasha at all, his mind reasoned quietly, then his odds of drawing on her before she put a bullet in him were slim to none.   
  
In six weeks, he hadn’t seen her. Maybe this was her idea of asking if they could get back together. Maybe not. She flicked her lighter, illuminating her face in a delicate golden glow, then snuffed it. No glowing ember of a cigarette lingered - just the image of her face, dark eyes fathomless in the pool of light, lips curved in a half-smile that could have meant anything or nothing.  
  
Before he entered the alley he half-closed his eyes, trying to get some kind of night vision away from the street lamps. She’d moved farther in, leaning against the crumbling brick like someone out of a noir film.  
  
He stopped about two meters away. The shadow of her lips curved in the dark, the impression of a smile. “I gave you my number,” she murmured, the subtle imitation of Moriarty’s voice imperfect but still disturbing. “I thought you might call.”  
  
John shivered and tried to tell his amygdala that Moriarty was dead and couldn’t blow people up anymore. “Sorry,” he answered sarcastically, “my doctor warned me off. Hazardous to my health.”  
  
“And you do worry so very much about your health, don’t you?” Her laugh was short, sharp as a razor. “You were so _eager_ to die for him that night. I remember your face in the sights, watching you threaten James, watching him show you up. Are you still that eager to die for Sherlock Holmes, John?”  
  
Spine stiffening, jaw set, John glared. “I’m not seeing the connection between ignoring you the last few weeks and almost getting blown up. Unless you’re threatening me. Which wouldn’t really convince me to start seeing you again.”  
  
“I’m done with that,” she said, so simply and directly that it was far more convincing than any amount of shouting could have been. “What I’m wondering now, Captain, is whether I’d be kinder to put a bullet in you now or later. After.”  
  
Stepping closer with hackles up, John tried to read her face. “After what? What are you planning?”  
  
“Oh, no. I’m not the one who plans things, John - don’t you know that by now? We aren’t planners, you and I. We’re just the hands that hold the rifle. They’re the planners - James and Sherlock, spinning their webs within webs.” She tilted her head back and laughed coldly, a stray reflection of a streetlamp catching the pale, burning intensity of her face. “We’re just the knights on the chessboard, waiting for the next time they move us. We’re disposable.”  
  
Mouth open around a retort, several things crashed together in John’s head all at once.   
  
_The Return of Sherlock Holmes._  
  
 _Someone’s yanking on threads and I can’t figure out who._  
  
 _They ‘are’--not ‘were.’_  
  
 _Webs within webs._  
  
 _Don’t be dead. Just...stop this._  
  
 _The only thing I want is to have him back._  
  
 _The universe back in its proper order. The way it should be._   
  
“We saw them die,” he whispered out of a hollow place in his chest that he’d almost forgotten, his hands trembling at his sides. “We _saw_ them die, Sasha.”  
  
Her voice shook as badly as his hands, and he could see the mad shine of her eyes as she took a step toward him. “Harry Houdini could make an elephant and its trainer disappear out of a theater in front of a crowd of thousands. They could have made us see anything they wanted, John - anything at all.”  
  
Shaking his head, he ran a hand through his hair, thinking of all the tangible and indisputable facts of the geniuses’ deaths, remembering the terrible details, trying to outrun the spark of hope that had already burned its way into his heart. _Some drugs slow the heartbeat to almost nothing,_ his mind goaded him. _People have survived jumping from five stories. People have even survived gunshots to the head._   
  
She must have seen that hope in his face or his eyes, because her voice softened. “You can’t walk away, can you? Now that you’ve had that thought, you can’t let it go - any more more than I can. Because if Sherlock Holmes is alive and James Moriarty is dead, then I know what I have to do. Just like you know what you have to do if Sherlock is dead and James is alive.”   
  
There was a flash of violent anger, pushing every other thought and feeling aside. “Yes,” he ground out. “Of course I do.” Just as suddenly, it left him, and he felt tired, tired of everything, and yet there it was, the thought that wouldn’t let him rest, not until he was sure.  
  
That same relentless impulse was already packing up the moments of respite and comfort between Sasha and him, stashing them away in a far corner of his mind, right next to where he kept memories of his second Taliban patient. Treating him had lasted for days, John nursing the young man back to health little by little, cajoling him to eat, and bullying the quartermaster for more painkillers. The last twenty-four hours John had spent distancing himself, going cold, focusing on the good people the insurgent had killed with his IEDs because the next morning the doctor handed the young man over to MI-6 and god knew what kind of treatment.  
  
The first time watching the spooks pull a hood over a patient’s head and drag him into a black chopper had left John furious, irrational, and generally a liability to everyone who depended on him. He’d learned how to manage it better.  
  
If Moriarty was alive, John was the only person in London who knew what he was capable of and was willing to fight him. Everything else would have to come second to that.  
  
If Sherlock was alive...if there was even the tiniest chance that Sherlock was alive, Sasha was going to hunt him. She was good. John would have to be better - he couldn’t depend on Sherlock to look after himself.   
  
He didn’t really want to think about what he’d be willing to do to her to get Sherlock back, or what that made him.   
  
“Goodbye, Sasha.” He would have liked to tell himself he didn’t recognize his own voice at that moment. It would have been much more flattering than admitting that he recognized it entirely too well and found it rather comforting.  
  
“Goodbye, John.” Her left hand came up, very fast, and her lighter flared in an arch toward him that dissolved his night vision into blue and white and gray splotches before the wind snuffed it and his own hand came up to snap it out of the air. She could have shot him then - he knew instinctively, even as his right hand was pulling the pistol from under his jacket, that without his eyes she could kill him at her leisure before he could index his weapon. No bullet came, no searing burst of pain, and when he finally flicked the tactical light under the barrel of his pistol to life and played it up and down the length of the alley, she had already vanished into thin air.  
  
After a minute or two, he flicked off the light and put the gun away, then stood in the dark for what felt like a long time while his eyes adjusted. Then he started back toward the street, the smooth steel weight of her lighter in his hand and a new purpose boiling like a fever in his head.   
  
He’d have to set up his own shooting range if he was going to be a soldier again.


End file.
